A Jehovah’s Witness congregation in Manchester has been criticised by the Charity Commission over its handling of allegations of child sex abuse by a senior member.

Victims of a convicted paedophile, Jonathan Rose, were forced to confront him face to face and answer questions about their abuse, including from him, at a three-hour meeting, the charity watchdog found. One alleged victim was criticised in correspondence as a troublemaker who was “economical with the truth”.

The charity’s trustees failed to provide “accurate and complete answers” to the investigation, the commission wrote, identifying “misconduct or mismanagement in the administration of the charity”.

The Charity Commission launched an inquiry into the Manchester New Moston congregation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2014. This followed reports that women who were abused by Rose, an “elder” who was jailed for child sex abuse in 2013, had been forced to confront him after his release from prison as he sought to rejoin the congregation.

The commission also launched an investigation into safeguarding by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Great Britain (WTBTS), the umbrella charity that oversees the UK’s 1,350 Jehovah’s Witness congregations and is believed by investigators to play a key role in deciding how claims of abuse are handled.

Concerns about how the Jehovah’s Witnesses handle such allegations have also surfaced in Australia, where a royal commission found congregations were encouraged not to report claims to the police, and in the US, where efforts to investigate allegations have resulted in fines of millions for withholding details of alleged child abusers.....

Shanley was accused of sexual abuse in the 1960's, the 1970's, the 1980's and the 1990's. His church personnel records indicated he was transferred from parish to parish despite allegations of abuse. The Boston Herald (4/9/02) printed that Shanley "spoke in favor of sex between men and boys at a formative 1978 meeting in Boston of the "Man Boy Lovers of North America" and that he "admitted openly to raping and sodomizing minors when confronted by church investigators under Boston's two past archbishops, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros and Law."

The Supreme Judicial Court agreed with a Superior Court judge who ruled earlier that repressed memory theory, or "dissociative amnesia," is controversial, but generally accepted in the relevant scientific community. The high court said the theory is supported by "a wide collection of clinical observations and a survey of academic literature."https://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/shanley-recovered-memory-case/

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